That is darn nice Rich! I really like the color.
Basically what I did was zoom in and use a brush tool to connect the dots (if you will) across where the black guardrail was. Lucky for me, I had another picture of the front of the building, taken from a similar angle, that I could use to fill in the blank spots where letters did not completely cross the black line in the image.
I worked at very close range to get the image down and then used the clone tool and one of the sponge type patterns to blend the new with the original. It was kinda like using a sledge hammer, in a way to get the layout and coming back with a scalpel to clean it up later. :)
My biggest problem I had was the fact that I was working on a JPEG image instead of RAW. When I took it, it was just gonna be a shot for me. After Chad (owner) saw some shots I was taking, he asked for copies for his web site. I flipped over to shooting RAW at that point. When I saw this one, I really wished I had has a better beginning point, but we work with what we have, correct?
After my latest DS ride, I have decided to shoot only in RAW from now on. It will limit what I can do before getting back to my home computer, but so be it. I had been shooting large JPEG all the time and adding RAW, when I saw a shot that I wanted to manipulate.